Set during a dinner among friends that gradually gets out of hand when they decide to make their private communications dangerously public, the tightly wound script — adapted from the original Italian version, which was directed by Paolo Genovese — is backed by Cavaye’s keen sense of staging and a solid cast that includes Berenice Bejo (The Artist), Suzanne Clement (Mommy) and Roschdy Zem (Point Blank), even if it doesn’t amount to quite enough in the end.

Set in the spacious pad of psychiatrist Marie (Bejo) and her plastic surgeon husband Vincent (Belgian comic Stephane De Groodt), the dinner involves two other couples and one loner. There’s the long-married Charlotte (Clement) and Marco (Zem), as well as recent lovebirds Lea (Doria Tillier) and Thomas (Vincent Elbaz). And then there’s Ben (the excellent Gregory Gadebois), who was supposed to arrive with a new girlfriend but shows up alone, setting the stage for a second-act twist that, although you can see it coming from a mile away, add some gravitas to the proceedings.

The gang has known each other for years, but they will suddenly get to know each other a whole lot more when Marie suggests that, instead of sending texts under the table or stepping outside to make calls, they do it all out in the open. The game (as the film is titled in French) starts off meekly enough, but then before you can say 4G, happily married spouses are receiving sexts from strangers, mistresses are leaving messages on voicemail and someone receives a clitoris pictoris by SMS.

Le Jeu is basically a drawing-room farce updated for the iPhone age, using its setup to explore adultery and other relationship foibles that have provided comic fodder for several centuries — especially in France’s theatre de boulevard tradition.

Cavaye, who up until now has cut his teeth on a handful of action-packed thrillers (including 2008’s Anything for Her, remade as the Russell Crowe vehicle The Next Three Days), was perhaps an unusual choice for such material. But he skillfully maneuvers the plot’s multiple turns while making strong use of the single setting, moving his camera and cast around to heighten the tension as much as possible.

Bejo gives a good performance that oscillates between comedy and something darker as Marie reveals herself to be far from a perfect wife, while Xavier Dolan regular Clement is perhaps the best of the bunch as a businesswoman blindsided by a quid pro quo involving her husband. Former Comedie-Francaise star Gadebois (Angel & Tony) is memorable as the group’s perennial punching bag, but also the only person in the room with any real sense of who he is.

If the film slides toward catastrophe in the last act, a final twist involving a rare lunar eclipse (there’s a running gag that has the gang trying and failing to take a selfie with it) sets things on a different path that feels like a cop-out. The ending seems to be saying that private lives should be kept private or else all hell would break lose, which is why cellphones are such a useful tool for daily deception.